That's everyday business for us. The idea is, how do I reduce the administrative burden I'm putting on individuals, number one. Number two, how do I take off the obstacles to having to fill out this form, and then fill out that form, and then fill out another form? It's partly selfish and partly an impact on the veteran. Partly selfish because each time I do that it takes me longer. I'm measured on my days to complete a claim from beginning to end, so I want to reduce all that and get it down to collecting it up front.
The other part of it is the VONAPP Direct Connect. The VDC online application we're talking about is the big focus for us. It allows me to do a TurboTax-style interview to collect information from a veteran in the form of data and process that significantly faster. This won't happen until this summer, but the idea is that a veteran comes in through the eBenefits portal and goes into the VONAPP Direct Connect to complete an online application, and they answer a series of questions. Until they answer all those questions all the way to the end, the veteran doesn't even know what information and forms in great detail I've done. I pre-populate in the right forms for them and feed that into my system. I'm trying to get the veteran completely away from the paper environment. As I said earlier, we'll always maintain the ability to do it through paper, but we're trying to capture that in an automated environment.
The other thing we put in place is the ability of the veteran to hit the save button at any time, lock in their effective date for payment, and then have up to one year to come back in and put that additional information in and submit that form to us.
So every single day I get up, every day that I'm at work, I'm trying to figure out a way to make the process faster and the easier for me and for the veteran.